Rise started inside Distinction, a global design and technology consultancy that's spent over two decades working with established brands.
We kept having the same conversation: founders would come to us with genuinely good ideas, but Distinction wasn't set up for the way startups need to work.
So, we'd point them towards agencies and freelancers, and hope for the best. And then we'd hear what happened next. It was rarely a happy ending.
They're programmed to maximise the initial project. Build it all. Build it now. Bill as much as possible right now.
That's great for the agency's revenue, but it's a terrible way to build a product.
Products should start small, grow iteratively, and be shaped by what the market actually tells you - not by what sounded good in a pitch deck.
But try explaining that to a team whose business model depends on selling you the biggest possible scope upfront.
They're cheaper, sure. But you're betting everything on one person's knowledge, one person's availability, and zero people in the room to challenge the thinking.
What happens when they're on holiday? What happens when they hit a problem outside their skillset? What happens when nobody says "hang on, have we actually validated this?".
We didn't think founders were being well-served by either option. So, we stopped sending them elsewhere and built something specifically for them.
Rise sits in the gap. A proper, multidisciplinary team - strategists, designers, engineers, behavioural scientists, go-to-market specialists - but structured for how startups actually work.
Phased roadmaps instead of monolithic builds. Investment that aligns with revenue streams. And a team that genuinely understands this isn't just a project for you. It's your money. Sometimes your savings. Always your life. We don't forget that.
Every founder wants to build the everything-app on day one. We get it - you can see the full picture and you want all of it, immediately. But here's what we've learned (sometimes the hard way): the smartest move is almost always the smallest one. Build something meaningful for a specific audience, prove it works, then grow. It's less glamorous than a big launch. But it's a hell of a lot less likely to bankrupt you.
We're led by what the market needs - qualitatively and quantitatively. Not by gut feelings, not by what sounds exciting over a coffee. We'll help you test your idea with real people before you spend serious money building it. Because if the market says yes, brilliant - we'll move fast. And if it says no? Better to find out now than six months and fifty grand later.
"Ship your MVP in 10 days! Move fast and break things! Disrupt everything!" You've seen the LinkedIn posts. We think most of it is complete rubbish. Moving quickly is fine - we do. But there's a difference between being fast because you're experienced and being fast because you're cutting corners. Your users will notice the difference. So will your investors.
We use AI extensively - for rapid prototyping, faster development, quality assurance, and pulling on our back-catalogue of previous work to keep quality high. It makes us quicker and more cost-effective for you. But we're not using it to replace thinking, and we're definitely not generating designs with a prompt and calling it a product. There's a difference between using AI well and using it lazily, and honestly, most of the industry hasn't worked out which one they're doing yet.
Everything we build belongs to you. The code, the designs, the documentation - all of it. We've heard too many horror stories about founders who can't leave their agency because the agency owns the intellectual property. That's not how we work. It never has been, and it never will be.
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Rise is co-founded by James and Greg Bloor. James brings the strategic thinking - the "what should we build and why" side. Greg brings the execution - the "right, let's build it properly" side. Both have started, scaled, and exited businesses of their own, so the conversation with founders tends to skip past the usual agency pleasantries and land somewhere more useful.
Around them is a team with experience across dozens of sectors, from raw startups to acquired scaleups. And it's not just designers and developers. We've got behavioural scientists, product strategists, go-to-market specialists, branding experts, and AI engineers. That breadth matters. A freelancer gives you one perspective. An agency gives you a process. Rise gives you a room full of people who've seen what works - and, just as usefully, what doesn't.
Why does that matter? Because when you're building a product from scratch, the decisions that feel small on day one tend to be the ones that cost you six months later. Having people around the table who've made those mistakes before - and can spot them coming - is worth more than any "robust delivery framework" ever will be.
We're nimble enough that your project matters to every person working on it. And senior enough that nobody's learning on the job with your budget.
Straight-talking advice on building digital products, validating ideas, and not wasting your money. No spam. No fluff. Just the stuff we wish someone had told us earlier
